Optical access: networks and components (overview)

The exponential growth of traffic delivered to an individual customer both for business and personal needs puts tremendous pressure on the telecommunications networks. Because the development of the long-haul and metro networks has advanced rapidly and their capacity much exceeds demand, tremendous pressure now falls in the local networks to provide customers with access to the global telecom infrastructure. Building a broadband access network enabling fast delivery of high-volume traffic is the current task of network operators. A brief review of broadband access networks brings us to the conclusion that only wired optical networks can serve as an immediate and future solution to the "last-mile" problem. After discussing optical access network classification, we focus mainly on passive optical networks (PON) because PON is a major technology today. From the network standpoint, we discuss the principle of PON operation, architectures, topologies, protocols and standards, design issues, and network management and services. We also discuss the main problems with PON and the use of WDM technology. From the hardware standpoint, we consider both active and passive components. We analyze the structure and elements of these components, including their technical characteristics.